Re: Another job for the Gnome Foundation ?

[kelly poverty bloomington in us]

On Mon, 21 Aug 2000 18:42:44 -0700 (PDT), Brian Behlendorf <brian@collab.net> said:

>Sounds like I was fouled on a technicality.  =) "Joint" still means
>that there has to be communication between the parties, even if it's
>just about how much each party made in licensing fees and render
>impossible the concept of exclusivity.

No real communication is required, just a periodic accounting.  :)

>My point remains: I see no
>value to having a "joint" ownership when having the gnome foundation
>be granted a "non-exclusive, unlimited, right to
>reuse/redistribute/modify/relicense" from the original developers
>would suffice, and be much simpler.

The problem with a non-exclusive license is that non-exclusive
licensees have no legal right to sue on the copyright because they
have no legally cognizable interest in the copyright itself.  An
assignee or exclusive licensee does, the assignee as owner and the
exclusive licensee as (in effect) a lessee.  

The entire point of the FSF's copyright assignment scheme is to
facilitate defending the copyright against infringers.  Without
assignment, bringing a suit to vindicate the license may (depending on
how the courts look at the matter) require identifying all of the true
owners of the code (which for a large project like GNOME could be
nearly insurmountable) and having all of them join together in a suit.
Failure to identify all of the owners might lead to a dismissal under
FRCP Rule 19 for failure to join an essential party.  There are also
nightmarish jurisdictional and conflict of laws issues since the
owners of a project the size of GNOME are spread over numerous
jurisdictions with disparate substantive and procedural law.

In effect, the mass common ownership of the intellectual property
rights in any serious GPL'd project may very well make the copyright
effectively unenforceable and reduces the status of GPL licensure to
being little different than "released to the public domain".

Kelly